The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences today announced that 21 scientific and technical achievements represented by 58 individual award recipients will be honored at its annual Scientific and Technical Awards Presentation on Saturday, February 7, at the Beverly Wilshire in Beverly Hills.

“To Erwin Coumans for the development of the Bullet physics library, and to Nafees Bin Zafar and Stephen Marshall for the separate development of two large-scale destruction simulation systems based on Bullet.

These pioneering systems demonstrated that large numbers of constrained rigid bodies could be used to animate visually complex, believable destruction effects with minimal simulation time.”

The new book Multithreading for Visual Effects includes a chapter on the OpenCL optimizations for upcoming Bullet 3.x. Other chapters include multithreading development experiences from OpenSubDiv, Houdini, Pixar Presto and Dreamworks Fluids and LibEE. You can get it at the publisher AK Peters/CRC Press or at Amazon.

Development of the open source Bullet Physics SDK continues at http://github.com/bulletphysics/bullet3 . All the open issues have been moved from the googlecode repository to github with links between old and new issues. There will be a Bullet 2.83 release using the github repository very soon, it is in alpha stage now. In 2014 we will be moving to Bullet 3.x and the unstable Bullet 3.x code is already included in Bullet 2.83.
Other news is that recently I joined Google to work on the robotics project!

The new Bullet 2.82 SDK is available for download. It allows for higher quality physics simulation, suitable for robotics, using the Featherstone articulated body algorithm. The release also introduces a new Mixed Linear Complementarity Problem (MLCP) solver interface, with various direct solver implementations. Read more here.

Our focus is now on integrating all Bullet 2.x features into the upcoming Bullet 3.x SDK. You can learn more about its progress in our SIGGRAPH course notes on GPU rigid body simulation at the Multithreading and VFX website.

We have been working with Larry Weinberg and his crew to integrate Bullet soft body and rigid body into Poser 3D. Create rigid simulations with constraints to build complex mechanical interactions. Paint softbody constraint weights to animate. Add jiggle and bounce to any prop or character. Use the Live Simulation mode to preview dynamics in realtime, or calculate simulations to include in rendered animations. See for more information on Bullet and Poser 3D here.

The new Bullet 2.81 Physics SDK is released. It includes an Apple contribution of SIMD and Neon optimizations for Mac OSX and iOS. Some new features include rolling friction ( so that curved shapes such as sphere, cylinders and cones will stop rolling, even on a sloped surface), a gear constraint, force and torque joint feedback, optional Coriolis forces and speculative contacts for fast moving objects. For more information and feedback see http://bulletphysics.org/Bullet/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?t=8490

Bullet 2.80 includes a preview of the GPU rigid body pipeline by Takahiro Harada, running 100% on the GPU using OpenCL. You can check out the Youtube videos or slides and precompiled binaries.
A new AMD Radeon 7970 Tahiti can simulate 110k objects in real-time between 15-30 frames/second. It also works on recent NVIDIA GPUs with latest drivers.

Graham Rhodes and Anthony Hamilton contributed a Android/NEON optimized version of Sony Physics Effects, which will be used as a handheld backend in Bullet 3.x. Last but not least, the open source Dynamica Bullet plugin for Maya is now deterministic and has preliminary support for soft body/cloth and convex decomposition through HACD.

The C++ version of Bullet can be build using the Native Client compiler and it runs full-speed in the Google Chrome web browser, without plugin. Just check your Chrome About Box to make sure the version is 15 or later and you can check out the live demo.

The Bullet C++ source code didn’t need any modification, and it compiled out-of-the-box using the premake4 generated Makefiles. Check out the Native Client for Dummies article for more information.

Bullet 2.79 is out. It is mainly a bugfix release, but there are a few new features. In particular there is a new convex decomposition library, HACD, integrated. Also we now support the premake build system, next to cmake and autotools. Premake can autogenerated Visual Studio project files that can be distributed, unlike cmake.

Furthermore, Ralph shared the news that Riptide GP for Android is using Bullet:

“Besides our internal tech there are three key components that made Riptide GP possible: The Android NDK, Bullet Physics, and FMOD Sound System. The NDK allows us to write native C++ code which is then optimized for the ARM architecture. Bullet Physics, which we use for collision detection and rigid body simulation, just worked out of the box. FMOD Sound System released an Android version of their SDK just in time, which has been working flawlessly since the first release.”

We are organizing a course on destruction and dynamics for game and film production for the SIGGRAPH 2011 conference in Vancouver. It will be held on Sunday August 7 from 2-5.15PM. Aside from this we released Bullet 2.78 a while ago. This release adds the option for contact generation between convex polyhedra using contact clipping and a fracture demo among others. Last but not least, AMD is looking for developers who want to help out with physics simulation, see the job description here.

The presentation is titled ‘game physics artifacts’ and covers similar material to chapter 2 of the Game Physics Pearls book. We will use both Bullet and the new Sony Physics Effects SDK to illustrate some examples. You can download the presentation for the Game Developers Conference Physics Tutorial and the preliminary Physics Effects-Bullet integration from http://code.google.com/p/bullet/downloads/list.

Also, you should check out the new Double Fine Studios Stacking game on XBox Live and PSN.